## Takeaways

Discussing technological accidents and accidental technology in the arts presses the question what is defined as accidents, and what is defined as technology. In the arts, accidents have been _poeisis_ (in some cases also _aisthesis_) for a long time. By focusing on chance operations, danger music, psychogeographies and hauntologies, we only picked the most obvious and pronounced examples. Whole genres of art, such as comedy and the grotesque, have employed accidents as their technology, poetic devices, and in the best cases also ontology and epistemologies; if we think, for example, of the philosophy of 莊周 (Zhuang Zhou) and literary works such as _西遊記_ (_Journey to the West_ by ), _聊齋誌異_ (the _Liaozhai_ ghost stories of 蒲松齡 [Pu Songling]) or the Western grotesque tradition from Rabelais and Cervantes to early-20th century dadaism and pataphysics. In the arts, especially where they operate in aesthetic safe spaces, there traditional, systemic-instrisic risks of romanticizing contingency and accidents - and hence of either glorifying or glossing over misery and suffering.

Art practice complicates the question of what usefulness, and efficacy ultimately is. Shiomi's Spatial Poem, for example, seems to be perfectly useless on first glance (and maybe also in the artist's perception), but retroactively appears a precise prototype of today's gamified technology. While usefulness and engineering efficacy are the traditional attributes and defining criteria of technology, the fact that art functions as visionary prototyping and mainstream industrial technology conversely has become gamified, increasingly questions the late 17th/early 18th century differentiation of the "artes", and makes it factually impossible to exclude social, psycho and even psychic techniques - everything that is speculative, up to the point of being haunted and irrational - from 'technology' proper. Phenomena such as cryptocurrencies conversely suggest that speculation and irrationality have become inscribed into mainstream technology. In other words, the attempt of artist collectives to turn an art event - documenta fifteen - into a real-life commons economy and 'ekosistem' and the ultra-libertarian speculative political economy and social design of Bitcoin could, in the future, be seen as two historically and ontologically parallel socio-technological enterprises. (Since imagination can never be dystopian enough, it wouldn't completely surprise us if some day, there would be a crypto-"Lumbung Coin" and blockchain, or "Lumbung ekosistems" created as gated communities by real estate developers.) 

It means that the question of what separates or unites technology and art, is being asked in quite different ways than in traditionally techno-experimental arts (i.e. New Media Art, ArtScience, digital art, bio art, etc). The point is not material experimentation with given technologies, but technologies that - in many cases: accidentally - result from socio-poetic experiments.

When communal-experimental quotidian practices become technologies, their upscaling from manual offline labor to automation and operationalization (as in The Eternal Nework versus Facebook/Meta, or Fluxhouse Cooperatives versus Airbnb) amplifies their unacknowledged issues and hidden dark sides, thus the accidental damage, the catastrophe.  


- both Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan privilege artists in anticipating socio-technological developments, by calling them "seismographs" and "antennas"; while our examples seem to support this hypothesis, there's the double-edged sword of a romanticist aesthetic ideology of the artist as visionary
- the appropriation, mainstreaming & commodification of artists' accidental technologies (such as: Mail Art social networking into Facebook) needs to be mentioned, but leads to a fatalist impasse: artists as the unintentional trendsetters of extractive capitalism, gentrification, new capitalist business models etc.; and issue that has been discussed since the Situationist International in the 1950s/60s (by the group as "récupération", whose English equivalent is "hijacking"). In neoliberal times, this seismographic function of art often is its only remaining justification (for obtaining public funding, for example). 
- The real question is whether the artificially separated realm of the arts shouldn't be reintegrated into everyday life and social practices (references: John Dewey, Art as Experience;  collective pracitces such as those of Display Distribute; documenta fifteen), which would partly obsolete the question of whether or not it should let itself hijack. [Since the semantics of hijacking still implies that art is an autonomous, separated realm from the rest of society]
- If the divisions of art, technology, research, society are up for dispute—which we think they should be -, this means that their relations need to be renegotiated, as opposed to one of them (such as "technology" in a now-conventional sense) becoming the leading paradigm. (-> Simondon [?] -> Federici [?])